Tennis is a very popular game world-wide. Indeed, many tennis novices take lessons to increase their proficiency. Lessons comprise practicing skills necessary to perform at a higher level and often entail the student hitting many tennis balls against the wall or returning them to instructor or fellow students across a net. Two common pieces of equipment assist instructors and players.
The first piece of equipment is an instructor teaching cart, which can hold approximately 350 tennis balls at waist level. During a lesson, an instructor or student repeatedly reaches into the teaching cart to access balls. Traditional teaching carts can move longitudinally and laterally on four wheels, which allows the instructor or player to easily maneuver the cart to different areas of the tennis court.
The second piece of equipment is a tennis ball mower that retrieves balls from the court that are later moved to the teaching cart, ball machine, or smaller ball baskets. The alternative to using a mower is to hand-pick each ball from the tennis court. Tennis ball mowers are usually large and bulky, and take up valuable space on the tennis court. The traditional tennis ball mowers collect the balls in a basket at ground level, requiring someone to manually transfer the basket of balls into another storage area. This task is inefficient and awkward.
The following describes a tennis ball collecting apparatus that does not rely on an outside power source, that is very maneuverable, and that efficiently collects the balls and sends them automatically to a waist-level storage basket, thereby offering easy access to the balls without having to manually transfer the balls.